"No health without mental health" has become a rallying call for the World Health Organization and numerous service providers, training institutions, health researchers, and advocacy groups around the world. It is timely to consider the implications of this call for South Africa. We review key evidence regarding the burden and risk factors for mental disorders in South Africa and crucial challe...

The World Health Organization has made concerted efforts to scale up mental health services in low- and middle-income countries through the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) initiative. However, an overreliance on scaling up services based on those used in high-income countries may risk causing more harm than good.

Internationally, civil commitment laws have gone through substantial reforms in the past 50 years. Discernible shifts from the medically paternalistic to the excessively legalistic may be giving way to a blending of legislative intent under the rubric of therapeutic jurisprudence. In the light of those international movements, Shao and Xie describe how China's new mental health law shows the im...

To increase the involvement of urban youth and families who need mental health services, child mental health agencies and providers might consider the following: (1) examining intake procedures and developing interventions to target specific barriers to service use; (2) providing training and supervision to providers to increase a focus on engagement in the first face-to-face meetings with yout...

Background Informal payments for health care, which are common in many countries, can have negative effects on health care access, equity and health status as they lead people to forgo or delay seeking care, or to sell assets to pay for care. Many countries are putting reforms in place with the aim of reducing informal payments. In order to be successful, such policies should be informed by the...

abstract: background: today one of the main problems low or middle income families face is financing healthcare costs. this article studies the methods of of financing health care costs among hospitalized diabetic patients in different types of insurances. materials & methods: this is a causal-comparative study. the variables consist of comparative (health care costs) and categorical(different ...

background & aim: nowadays, home health care services play significant roles in modern societies. such services allow the elderly and needy people to pass their treatment process at their own houses in a friendly environment. in this paper, weekly routing and scheduling problem of home health care personnel was investigated. methods & materials: insufficient number of expert personnel or overla...

background: the healthcare and socio-economic burden resulting from influenza a (h1n1) pdm09 in spain was considerable. our aim was to estimate and compare the management (resource utilization) and economic healthcare impact in an at-risk group of unvaccinated pregnant women with an unvaccinated group of non-pregnant woman of childbearing age (15-44 yr old). methods: we addressed this question ...